In the coming days and weeks, you will read quite a bit about which teams should buy and which should sell, at FanGraphs and elsewhere. As the midpoint of the season approaches, the Pirates once again reside on the bubble. They’re a team once again with a slim but mathematically possible path to the postseason — a 2.9% chance, according to FanGraphs projections — a team that most expect to sell prior to the deadline.

Dave placed the Pirates in his sellers bucket earlier this week in his examination of the forming market, also noting that Andrew McCutchen had rebuilt some trade value due to his recent improvement — possibly a result, that improvement, of McCutchen having finally identified a swing flaw. After a lengthy down period, which included his baffling age-29 decline last season and an even worse start to the 2017 season, McCutchen more resembles his former self. The Pirates tried to move him last winter without success. If teams believe his current run is a result of tangible change, that could make him more appealing.

Jon Morosi of FoxSports reports that the Pirates will listen on Gerrit Cole

Executives from other Major League teams said this week they expect the Pirates will listen to offers for Cole ahead of the July 31 non-waiver Trade Deadline, and that the A’s will do the same with Sonny Gray. …. For both the Pirates and A’s, a crucial part of the Trade Deadline calculus must be the opportunity to capitalize on an apparent shortage of No. 1 — and even No. 2 — starters available on this year’s trade market.

So what should the Pirates do?

They should sell, probably, but in a particular sort of way. In fact, they might have created a model to follow last deadline.

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So far, the Diamondbacks have been a major surprise, and although every surprise is, by definition, surprising, there are degrees. What makes the Diamondbacks all the more surprising is that they are where they are without Shelby Miller. A Miller bounceback was supposed to be key to their hopes, but then he got hurt, which should’ve been trouble. Enter Zack Godley. Godley has plugged the hole, and then some.

Relative to last season, Godley’s been one of the more improved starting pitchers in the major leagues. While he has several elements going on at any one time, his main trick is a dynamite curveball that he’s fallen in love with. By run values, it’s been baseball’s second-best curveball, behind Corey Kluber and above Lance McCullers. Godley’s curve is something special, and it causes one’s discipline to deteriorate. It’s not an easy pitch to lay off.

Godley, on Thursday, got a start in Colorado. He faced Charlie Blackmon to lead off the bottom of the first, and Godley got Blackmon to a two-strike count. A couple curves couldn’t finish him off. Nor could a couple non-curves. Godley’s seventh pitch came in a 2-and-2 count, and at last he threw the pitch that he wanted. The curve caught the plate, but it plummeted below the zone. It was labeled for the dirt, but too sharp to spit on. It was the swing-and-miss curve to make Blackmon go away.

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One frequent topic of debate this season is whether Max Scherzer has overtaken Clayton Kershaw as the majors’ best pitcher.

Scherzer, for example, has recorded the majors’ second-largest strikeout- and walk-rate differential (29.1 points), behind only Chris Sale (30.5 K-BB%), while Kershaw ranks a somewhat distant third (24.6) by that measure. Scherzer (3.1) trails only Sale (4.6) in the FIP-based version WAR and leads all pitchers by the sort calculated with runs allowed. Scherzer also leads both Kershaw and Sale in Bill James’ starting pitcher rankings, something akin to world rankings in golf and tennis.

Depending on what metrics or qualities one cares to cite, the identity of Best Pitcher is open to debate. What’s not debatable is that, over the past three years or so, Scherzer has been the pitcher most likely to do something incredible in any given outing.

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It’s difficult to overstate how much Freddie Freeman means to the Braves. He is, at present, the face of the franchise, and rather than trade Freeman, his general manager would sooner give his right arm. It’s not just that Freeman’s the best player on the Braves — Freeman is the Braves, for all intents and purposes. Although he isn’t Mike Trout, he’s the Braves’ Mike Trout, and the Angels aren’t going to trade Mike Trout. They’re going to cherish him, feature him, build around him, promote the hell out of him. The Braves have been going through a difficult stage. Freeman’s helped to keep them marketable.

Freeman’s great. He’s gotten some amount of MVP support in three separate years. He’s long been firmly entrenched as the Braves’ everyday first baseman, and there was never really any question about that. That is, until now. As soon as Freeman got injured, the team dealt for Matt Adams. Adams started to hit well almost immediately. Now it looks like a healthy Freeman could play third base in order to keep Adams in the lineup. What’s even weirder is, I think it makes sense?

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After a five-year run as one of the best players in baseball, Andrew McCutchen put up the worst year of his career in 2016. His strikeouts went up, his power and BABIP went down, and his defense was bad enough to finally precipitate a move out of center field. All told, McCutchen produced just +0.7 WAR last year, and when the team hung a superstar asking price on him in trades over the winter, they didn’t find anyone willing to meet their demands.

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After the worst year of his career, including spending time on the DL with shoulder issues, Sonny Gray looks healthy again, posting his best fielding-independent numbers since his rookie year. And with the A’s looking like sellers, Gray is expected to get moved in the next month or so. And according to Susan Slusser, it might be sooner than that, with the Astros reportedly the most aggressive buyer at the moment.

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Some say it’s all been done before. That’s perhaps mostly true, but as something only mostly true, all of it has not actually been done before. This is especially true if you are willing to include qualifiers. Take this example: Before last weekend, no player had ever completed a cycle with a walk-off homer when the team was trailing at the time of the blast, per Baseball-Reference’s Play Index. Nolan Arenado has now eliminated that previous distinction.

Cycles are fairly rare, occurring 255 times, per Baseball-Reference, roughly once every 700 games, and this decade has been in line with that average. Since the beginning of last season, there have been 99 walkoff wins that ended in a homer, about one in 35 games. Of those 99 walkoffs, just 19 were come from behind homers, and only 13 came in the ninth, roughly one in 266 games. Put those two together, and we have about a one in 750,000 chance of both happening in a game. Given we’ve had about one quarter of that many games played over the last 100 years, it seems reasonable we’ve waited this long.

There have been a few other similar games over the years if you relax some of the requirements. There were only nine games in the Baseball-Reference Play Index where a player hit for the cycle and had the game winning hit in a walkoff. Many might have seen that the last player to hit a walkoff homer to complete a cycle was Carlos Gonzalez in 2010. He hit his shot to break a 5-5 tie against the Cubs. Hopefully the seven year difference between occurrences adds to the perceived rarity as opposed to making it seem commonplace. Read the rest of this entry »

On Opening Day, Edwin Encarnacion made his presence immediately felt with his new team. With Cleveland down a run, one out in the eighth, and Matt Bush on the mound, Encarnacion homered to tie the game in Arlington. It was his second hit — in just his fourth plate appearance — for his new team. By WPA, it was the biggest play of the game to that point (it would end the day as the second-biggest). By the time he came up for his fifth plate appearance, Cleveland had pulled ahead by three runs, and they would go away winners. Unfortunately, Encarnacion wouldn’t hit another homer for 13 games. In the 12 games between those homers, he would hit just .182/.308/.205 (48 wRC+) in a 53-PA stretch that had some Cleveland fans feeling a whole lot of buyer’s remorse.

Fortunately, Encarnacion hasn’t maintained that horrid performance all season. In fact, as the calendar has flipped to June, he’s been on fire. His 228 wRC+ for the month is tops in the majors, and his 132 wRC+ for the season is now 32nd among qualified hitters. In case you hadn’t noticed that he was heating up, he punctuated the hot streak yesterday with two homers off of Twins starter Kyle Gibson, accounting for the only three runs Cleveland would require to secure both the win and also four-game road sweep of the Twins. He then tacked on an RBI single and a sac fly just for fun, which made him responsible for driving in all five Cleveland runs on the day. Not bad. And the home runs were pretty, to boot, both landing in Target Field’s second deck.

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The Cubs, like all teams, are looking for an edge, for many edges.

The current front office began by focusing on position-player talent with premium draft picks, believing such prospects were safer bets to become impact major-league players. So far, so good.

When the world shifted three infielders to the right or left of second base, the Cubs started to shift less — and continue to do so. The result: one of the game’s most efficient defenses in recent history.

The club is interested in soft power, too. The Cubs have facilitated communication and collaboration between different departments — as have many other clubs — and better ways to facilitate cooperation. One way might be through the game’s only round clubhouse.

The Cubs, in brief, have exhibited a number of ways to get ahead.

July 2 marks the beginning of the hard-cap era for international signings. It also marks another opportunity for the Cubs to get ahead. This year, teams will no longer be allowed to lavishly outspend bonus-pool limits. Teams like the Cubs will now face a penalty for exceeding pool limits, losing the ability to extend anything greater than a $300,000 bonus to an international player. The Cubs have exhibited some creativity in recent years, however, in their attempt to work around pool limits. They’re likely to continue to do so.

Now the Cubs have perhaps found another edge in their pursuit of talent: Mexico.

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Bud Black pitched twice in Denver.

The first occasion was as a minor leaguer for the Omaha Royals in 1983 when he faced the Denver Bears, the Triple-A affiliate of the Texas Rangers. A decade later, Black returned to Mile High Stadium at the foot of the Rocky Mountains for his first and only major-league start at 5,200 feet above sea level — in this case, against the expansion Rockies on May 12, 1993. The next closest stadium in elevation at the time was Atlanta’s Fulton County Stadium (1,050 feet) followed by Kauffman Stadium in Kansas City (886 feet). Perhaps in all of professional baseball only Mexico City’s Foro Sol (elevation: 7,350 feet) was an environment less conducive to pitching.

Even as a minor leaguer in the early 1980s, Black had heard all about the perils of pitching in the thin air of Denver, about what it means to have fewer molecules bouncing off batted balls and pitches. Most often Black heard about how ineffective breaking pitches were there, with the Magnus force exerting less influence over a ball due to an air density of just 82% compared to sea level.

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